Construction cost control: plan, actual and forecast per item

The budget is a set of groups and items, each with a planned amount and, where it belongs to one, a phase. A template with eleven groups is ready for an empty budget. Every change to the structure, from a new item to a moved plan, is recorded in the activity log.

The budget covers the cost side. Income comes from client contracts, so money out and money in are never mixed in one column.

Each entry carries its counterparty, its document number and its date. Claude can read an invoice and file it as a proposal with these fields filled in; it becomes a record only after a person approves it, and a second proposal with the same counterparty and number is refused as a duplicate.

• Commitment: an agreed amount that is not invoiced yet, such as a signed contractor order.
• Invoice: what the supplier has billed.
• Payment: what has actually left the account.
• Credit note: an amount returned or written off.

The forecast of an item is what is invoiced plus what is committed. A commitment counts the day it is agreed, so an overrun shows while you can still renegotiate, reduce the scope or move money from another item.

The plan versus actual table shows every item side by side: plan, invoiced, paid, committed and forecast.

The thresholds are defaults; the owner can change them for the company or for a single project.

• Item over budget: the forecast of an item is more than 5% above its plan.
• Spend ahead of progress: money is invoiced faster than the phase progresses, a sign of a prepayment or an inflated invoice.
• Big transaction and transaction without a document number: two optional checks the owner can switch on.

Entries can be in any currency. Rates come from the European Central Bank or are entered by hand, and each amount is converted into the project currency at the rate of its date. A currency the bank does not publish is named on the page so you can enter its rate.

Transactions are never edited or erased in the interface. A wrong one is voided with a reason: it stays visible, struck through, and stops counting in the totals.